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Some members may notice that they are receiving different notifications now on boards and topics that interest them.

One of the Mods I trialled 2 days ago claimed that it was compatible with SMF1.1.11, and would change notifications to include new replies as well as new topic on those boards for which members have requested notifications. It has certainly done that, but in some surprising ( and some unwanted ) ways!

For example, I got 3 sets of notifications for BJ's OP here, one showing a New Topic ( which it should ), and 2 showing him making a reply to himself, ( which aren't there. )Looking at his post, I believe this may be accounted for by the fact that he made 2 edits / modifications to his OP.

Now the reason why I trialled this Mod was because I have long wanted to be notified of new replies as well as new topics, but the support information on the SMF forum said nothing about every edit generating a New Reply notification !

Unfortunately I can do nothing about this now, so I can only advise members who find too many replies being sent to their email to simply delete the unwanted ones ( or to withdraw their requests for notifications all together. )

I believe that it may have been this Mod which gave us a software glitch preventing new posts, so I have actually deleted all traces of it from the forum. However, it has obviously changed our scripts in some way, and I can do nothing about that now, as I am neither competent to edit php scripts, nor do I have the means of uploading any such changes to our server even if I were.

So we shall have to adapt to what we now have. At least it is now generating too many notifications, rather than too few, as before !

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Over the last fortnight two noteworthy things have happened. We can only speculate whether these are linked or not.

Firstly, we have been flooded with well over 100 new members. We wish to give the majority of these a warm welcome.However, a considerable minority have turned out to be spammers.Several posted messages in Russian, which few if any members could understand.Some others posted spam offers for drugs and other products.Sadly, we have had to resort to banning them all, as they are a plague on the forum.

The second big event has been the partial failure of our notification system.All of a sudden, no notification messages were delivered to anybody (including Admins) using a Gmail account.Whether this is directly related to the number of spam post notifications being sent out is hard to say.But it is certainly a big nuisance for those who like to use Gmail, and depend on getting notification messages for new topics, replies, PMs, etc.

My first response to this regrettable development was to attempt to send out notifications messages through mail services other than Gmail.However this proved to make no difference unfortunately. Gmail users still got no notifications, whilst all others did, as far as I know.So we are stuck with this problem for the time being.

davegr has suggested a possible solution, which I have asked him to look into for us, and about which to consult with Mikael.However even were his suggestion accepted and implemented, I doubt that it could be done very quickly.It is for this reason that I believe some quick and immediate solution needs to be made available to members.

As the problem affects Gmail users only, I have amended our Admin settings to allow every member to change his email address, without his account needing to be reactivated. To do this, go to your profile page, and change it through the Account Related Settings link. Gmail users are now able to change their registered email here to any other email address they choose.

An alternative process, for those who wish to keep Gmail as their main email provider, is to open a second email account from a provider who allows automatic forwarding of emails. I have kept my Gmail account as it is, but arranged to have my email set here to an Outlook email address - which automatically forwards incoming mail to my Gmail account. This works, and duly arrives in my Gmail account.

At least 2 prominent email providers offer automatic email forwarding: Yahoo and Outlook.Please note, however, that you can only set up forwarding on Outlook after your account has been verified. This involves giving Outlook a mobile number to which they send a security access code, which you input to Outlook. (There may be a comparable procedure on Yahoo, but I have not tried using it.)

I will post here again if a better solution is implemented, but I hope the above suggestions will help members to manage in the meantime.

Admin.

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